Where are the Drupal people in your town?

I was lucky enough to meet quite a few local organizers at Drupalcon, and a few folks who were looking to grow their local communities as well. I promised them that I would share some of the things I've learned over the years. This is the first of several posts.

Lone Drupalistas

Recently, two guys from Bryan/College Station (BCS) came to the Austin Drupal Dojo. They came on different nights. The two of them didn't know each other.

I asked the second fellow if he knew the first, and he didn't. I asked him if there was a Drupal meet in BCS, and he replied that he only knew 2 other guys in town who were working with Drupal. That's why he came to Austin -- to hang out with other Drupal users.

I already knew that there were at least ten people in BCS who were interested in Drupal -- to the extent that they considered it worthy to mention in their LinkedIn profile. I suggested to this guy to search LinkedIn for Drupal in the BCS zipcodes and start a group. Then he wouldn't have to drive a few hours to Austin just to meet other Drupal folks.

Drupal on LinkedIn

It was through LinkedIn that I started to connect with my local Drupal community. As an outsider new to Drupal, I didn't know about groups.drupal.org (GDO). There were no local Facebook groups for Drupal, and Meetup stinks for anything other than organizing a monthly meet.

The number of Drupal people on LinkedIn was actually one of the factors in my decision to migrate GeekAustin from SlashCode to Drupal. I had been running Slash since 2000, but by 2006, public Slash contributions had all but come to a standstill -- which meant that many of the newer features I wanted simply would never be available. I wanted my next CMS to have a large user/developer community -- so there would be plenty of people who could help me come up to speed.

These two LinkedIn searches pretty much told me what I needed to know:

LinkedIn profiles mentioning Drupal: 17,087

LinkedIn Austin profiles mentioning Drupal: 209

There were 209 people within 100 miles of me who considered Drupal important enough to mention in their LinkedIn profile. Judging by this number, it was a safe bet that, no matter what my problem was, I'd be able to find someone to help me.

Searching elsewhere for Drupalistas

Meetup.com has a strong presence in Austin for many years, so the next place I checked was the local meetup group:

Austin Drupal Meetup: 170 members.

Jerad Bitner tells me that Austin may be a bit unique in that the local meetings (for the last few years at least) have been organized mostly through meetup.com. In other cities he has visited, the habit is to organize the get togethers through the local GDO group. My own search showed nine cities with larger Drupal meetup groups than Austin.

A quick search of Austin + Drupal on Google led me finally to GDO Austin:

http://groups.drupal.org/austin

The GDO Austin group has 284 members. If this group was a typical online group, I knew that most of these folks would not be active, but even if only a fraction were, there would be ample folks with whom to share the experience of learning Drupal.

But where is everyone?

When I first went to the local Austin Drupal Meetup, there were about 35 people in attendance -- little more than a tenth of what I located online. After a few Meetups, it was clear that this was not the fault of the organizer. Former Austinite and now Bigtime Bay Area Drupalist, Lauren Roth (@laurennroth), was doing a great job bringing speakers every month. So where was everyone?

Having been involved in, and hosted events for, numerous local tech groups, there were several things that I knew about the numbers for these groups:

• Recruiters and hiring managers join Meetup and LinkedIn groups when looking for talent -- and they remain in the group. In some cases, like Java user groups, I seen nearly 30% enrollment by recruiters.
• Some of the members may have joined when they started working with Drupal, but either ran out of free time or hit a learning block -- and are still membeers.
• Some members may once have been working on a Drupal project and, although that time may have long since passed, they remain in the group.
• Some of the older members may be longtime Drupal experts who simply haven't been motivated recently to attend meetup-style presentations.

I also knew from experience that there would be people in the LinkedIn and Facebook groups that were not members of the GDO group, etc. So the combined number of Drupalistas from these three sources could be as many as 400 people or more.

So, how many people really are in my local Drupal community? and how to I meet them?

Everyone likes a party. Throw a party or a happy hour. That's what I did. I called it Drinks and Drupal. It's a catchy name. If you like it, feel free to use the name for your event too.

The key thing is to get people together in the same room, sharing experiences and having a good time. Knowledge exchange will happen and new friendships will be struck. The Drupal community needs all kinds of people -- programmers, designers, and local gadflies too. You can take the initiative to make an event like this happen.

In a followup, I'll share some of the dos and donts I've learned from hosting tech events over the last few decades.

-Lynn